Welcome to LiveDigitally

Many of us have seen tremendous technological changes that have had great impact on our lives. Even for the tech-savvy and early technology adopters, like myself. I'm not talking about the invention of television, the microwave oven, or even cell phones. That's old stuff. Even the invention of the Internet is old stuff now. I'm talking about what's happened after the Internet 2.0 revolution, about 5 years ago. I'm not going to go into what Internet 2.0 is. You can read about that elsewhere. It's what has happened after that, which doesn't even have a name, that's so big. It's happened so fast that many don't even realize it's here. But it's here, believe me, and the change has been so big and radical that it's going to take a while until most of us catch up.


I went to the gym today and started on the treadmill. It had a large touchscreen display, USB, and iPod connectivity. I didn't have much time to explore all the functionality built into that machine then, so I just used the "speed up" and the "speed down" buttons to tailor my workout. During those 20 minutes, just by looking at the options on the main screen I realized that I could have designed my workout on the Internet, saved it on a pen drive, and loaded it into the machine. When my routine was complete, after I hit the STOP button, the treadmill asked if I wanted to record my exercise data into a pen drive, which of course I didn't because I don't usually carry my sweat-resistant pen drive with me.


What if I had done all these nerdy tech stuff? The machine and my pen drive would now know a lot about me. My exercise routine including speed and inclination second by second. Would also know at what time of the day I exercised, how much I weigh today and my heart rate at specific times during the exercise. From this data, it can trivially tell how much energy I dissipated, or said otherwise, how many calories I burned, and how fit and healthy I am after looking at my heart rate in response to exercise. This is just the beginning. What if the machine could compare the data from several workout sessions, and even to that of other people all around the world, and draw conclusion and recommendations after that. Too much imagination, you'd say. Well, I was keeping this for the end. It actually does.


This blog will treat these matters through articles and tutorials written mostly by myself. My objective is to give people an early understanding of the phenomenon, where it came from and where it's going. Through tutorials, I'm aiming to give you some insight on how to make the best out of this new reality, in our personal life, our social lives, our profession, our studies, and more.


I'm an Electrical Engineer born in Chile in the late 1970's. Perhaps my first close contact with modern technology was the Atari 800XL computer I was given one birthday. I must have been about 10 years old then. I decided later to become an Engineer, which led me to work at a large multi-national research institution. I've quit my job now, and I'm a full-time Ph.D. student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta. Since the Atari, I saw the birth of the cell phone, cable television, digital cameras, the Internet, cheap GPS navigation systems, flash storage (pen drives), WIFI, secure online commerce, instant messaging (chat), and several others. A lot of other technology has become very cheap too, so now we can all have personal computers, scanners, printers, internet-access cell phones, etc. I believe I've grown up at the exact right time, have had the interests and had the education, that have allowed me to see "the big picture" in this matter.


I hope you enjoy and find these essays useful.